India November 2010: Nano sinks to 509 sales

In this blog I normally focus on best performances and don’t dwell on the weak ones, but this is such shocking news that it had to be the main headline: the Tana Nano only found 509 new owners in the whole of India last month…

This is very bad news for Tata which had sky high expectations for this model (starting with 250,000 units/year). Instead, apart from 3 months above 5,000 sales this summer, the Nano had been vegetating around 3,500 monthly sales most of the year, with supply issues blamed. Now, with the car fully available across the country, it seems the real issue is that there is actually no market for the Nano in India. Too rudimentary, noisy and overtly ‘low-cost’ for a demanding and image-conscious consumer that, for the same price, prefers a larger second-hand car…

Is it the end of the road for the Nano?

Rest of the commentaries and Full Top 30 Ranking table below.

An exhaustive Indian analysis of the “Nano Case”, complete from the announcement of the project to its latest developments (a number of models catching fire), can be found here. Language note: lakh=100,000.

In the rest of the ranking, the Top 4 stays unchanged with very solid figures. The Maruti Alto enjoys its 3rd consecutive month at 30,000+ units, ahead of the Maruti Wagon R (15,617), Hyundai i10 (14,617) and Maruti Swift (12,198). 2 models lodge a best-ever position this month: the Hyundai i20 in 7th (7,228 sales) and the Maruti Ritz in 9th (6,377).